A few months into my own retirement, I began to understand something I had not expected.
I had spent years thinking about retirement as freedom. Freedom from deadlines, meetings, early alarms and the constant sense that somebody needed something from me. I imagined how wonderful it would be to wake up and have an entire day that belonged to me.
And it was wonderful — for a while.
Then one morning, I found myself sitting with a cup of coffee wondering what I was going to do with the day. There was nothing particularly wrong. I wasn’t unhappy. But I felt strangely ungrounded, as though the structure that had quietly held my life together had disappeared overnight.
It wasn’t the big experiences I was struggling to imagine. I could picture holidays, family visits and long-awaited adventures. It was the ordinary days in between that felt less clear.
That is why I begin my latest video with a number that stopped me in my tracks: if you retire at 65 and live until 90, you will have approximately 1,300 ordinary Tuesdays.
Not birthdays. Not Christmas mornings. Not the first day of a European holiday. Just Tuesdays.
In the video, I explore why creating a vision for retirement is not the same as writing a bucket list — and why the difference may matter far more than we realise.
A bucket list is made of exceptions
There is nothing wrong with having a bucket list. I have places I would still love to visit and experiences I hope to have. The anticipation of an adventure can bring its own kind of pleasure.
But a bucket list is mostly a collection of exceptions.
Swimming with dolphins, walking the Camino or finally seeing the Northern Lights may create unforgettable memories, but these experiences occupy a very small portion of a 25-year retirement. They tell us surprisingly little about what life will feel like when we wake up on an ordinary Tuesday with nowhere we have to be.
A vision asks a different question.
It asks what kind of life we want to inhabit between the special occasions. What will give shape to the week? Who will we talk to? What will help us feel useful, interested, connected and physically alive? What will we look forward to when there is no holiday marked on the calendar?
These questions are less glamorous than planning a trip to Tuscany. They are also much harder to answer.
For much of our working lives, the structure of an ordinary week arrives ready-made. Work determines when we get up, where we go, what problems we solve and who we see. Even if we occasionally complain about that structure — and most of us become rather accomplished at complaining about Monday mornings — it provides more psychological scaffolding than we may recognise.
When work ends, the scaffolding can disappear with it.
Retirement removes more than a job
Before retiring, I understood intellectually that I would be leaving my career. What I had not fully appreciated was how many other things were attached to it.
My work gave me purpose, connection, challenge, identity and a reason to organise my time. It placed me among other people and regularly asked something of me. When I retired, those things did not necessarily follow me home.
This is one reason retirement can feel unexpectedly unsettling, even when it is financially secure and freely chosen. A person may be pleased to leave the pressure of work behind while simultaneously missing the rhythm, relationships and sense of usefulness that came with it.
Retirement researchers increasingly describe adjustment as a process rather than a single event. Financial preparation undoubtedly matters, but wellbeing in retirement is also influenced by health, relationships, psychological resources and the activities that give daily life meaning.
Research on retirement planning has similarly begun to look beyond savings alone. One study of an online planning intervention for retirees found that encouraging people to think about their future and plan across different life areas showed promise in supporting broader retirement preparation.
This makes intuitive sense. Money can give us choices, security and freedom. It cannot, by itself, tell us what to do with a quiet Wednesday afternoon.
A vision helps the future feel like a real life
One reason we may struggle to prepare for retirement is that our future self can feel remarkably abstract.
We know, logically, that an older version of us will eventually inhabit the future we are creating. Emotionally, however, that person can feel almost like a distant relative: familiar enough to acknowledge, but not always close enough to influence what we do today.
Psychologist Hal Hershfield and his colleagues have studied what they call “future-self continuity” — the degree to which people feel connected to the person they will become. In a series of experiments, people who encountered age-progressed images of themselves made more future-oriented financial decisions, including allocating more money towards retirement. The researchers suggested that making the future self more vivid could help people give greater weight to that person’s needs. You can read the published research on future-self continuity here.
The principle may extend beyond financial decisions. In other research described by Hershfield, people who felt more connected to their future selves reported better subjective health, while an exercise involving writing to a future self was associated with more exercise in the following days. The findings do not mean that simply imagining the future will transform our behaviour, but they suggest that a future we can picture may be easier to care about than one that remains vague.
This is where a retirement vision becomes useful.
A meaningful vision is not a grand prediction of everything that will happen. Life is far too fond of surprises for that. It is a way of making the future concrete enough that we can begin moving towards it.
Instead of saying, “I want to be happy in retirement,” we might begin to picture what happiness looks like in practice. Perhaps it includes walking in the morning, seeing grandchildren regularly, learning something difficult, contributing to a community, tending a garden or having a friend we can call without first checking whether we have a sufficiently important reason.
The details will be different for every person. That is precisely the point.
The four ingredients that give an ordinary week its shape
Over time, I have come to think of a fulfilling retirement as having four important ingredients: connection, purpose, energy and vision.
Connection is about the people and communities that make us feel known and involved. It does not necessarily mean having a packed social calendar. For some people, a small number of close relationships will be far more nourishing than a diary full of engagements.
Purpose is the sense that our presence and efforts still matter. It might come from volunteering, creative work, caring for family, mentoring, learning or building something of our own. Purpose does not need to be impressive. It simply needs to feel meaningful to the person living it.
Energy is what allows us to participate in the life we are creating. It includes physical health, but it is broader than fitness. Energy can also be affected by sleep, curiosity, emotional wellbeing, movement and whether our days contain things that genuinely engage us.
Vision brings the other three ingredients together. It gives them direction. Without some picture of the life we want, it is easy to keep collecting worthy activities without knowing whether they add up to a life that feels like ours.
The difficulty is that we rarely need all four ingredients in equal measure. One person may have good health and plenty of interests but feel lonely. Another may be surrounded by family yet miss the competence and purpose they experienced at work. Someone else may have a long list of plans but not enough energy to enjoy them.
Often, the most useful first step is not trying to reinvent an entire retirement. It is identifying the ingredient that needs attention now.
A two-minute quiz can give you a clearer starting point
That is why I created the free Thrive quiz.
It takes about two minutes and is designed to help you see which of the four ingredients — connection, purpose, energy or vision — may currently need more attention in your retirement.
You receive a personalised result rather than a generic score. The value of that result is not that it labels you or tells you exactly how to live. It gives you a place to begin.
You may discover that you have been trying to solve an energy problem by adding more social commitments. Perhaps you have been treating a lack of purpose as though you simply need another hobby. Or you may realise that you already have many good things in your life, but they do not yet form a clear picture of where you are heading.
That kind of clarity can be surprisingly reassuring. A vague feeling that retirement is “not quite right” can be difficult to act upon. A more specific recognition — I need greater connection, or I have lost my sense of direction — makes the next conversation or small decision easier to identify.
You can take the free two-minute Thrive quiz and receive your personalised result here.
It is not a test you pass or fail. There is no ideal retirement personality waiting at the end. It is simply an invitation to pause and notice what is already working, what may be missing and where a small change could make the greatest difference.
The real question is not what you want to do before you die
Bucket lists tend to ask, “What do I want to do before I die?”
It is an exciting question, but perhaps it is not the only one worth asking.
We might also ask: “How do I want to live while I am alive?”
That question brings us back to the ordinary week — the morning routines, conversations, projects, movement, quiet pleasures and moments of anticipation from which most of a life is made.
A fulfilling retirement does not need to look ambitious from the outside. It does not require constant travel, an impressive second career or a calendar crowded with activities. It needs enough connection, purpose and energy to make the days feel alive, and enough vision to help those days move in a direction that feels chosen.
The size of the dream is not what matters. The having of one does.
Because retirement is not made mainly from the exceptional days we photograph. It is made from those 1,300 Tuesdays — and from the ordinary life we gradually create inside them.
